'Park': Unblinking Eye on Failed Justice

Watch a clip from the Ken Burns documentary "The Central Park Five," which examines the 1989 case of five black and Latino teenagers who were falsely convicted of raping a white woman in Central Park. (Photo & Video: Sundance Selects)

By

Joe Morgenstern

Updated Nov. 29, 2012 6:50 p.m. ET

Simply stated, "The Central Park Five," which goes into national release this week, is a documentary about five black and Latino teenagers from Harlem who were convicted of a horrific crime they didn't commit—the beating and rape, in 1989, of a white woman who had been jogging at night in Manhattan's Central Park. But nothing is simple in this painstaking, heartbreaking film, which was written and directed by
Ken Burns
with his daughter,
Sarah Burns,
and
David McMahon.
As filmmaking, it's a departure from Mr. Burns's characteristically measured tone; anger boils beneath the carefully composed surface. As history, it's a shattering portrait of New York at a time when the city, beset by violence and drowning in drugs, was frantic to assign blame for a terrible crime that appeared to be, not incidentally, an interracial crime. As a case study of law gone off the rails, it's about police and prosecutorial conduct, and the conjoined questions of whether the defendants' confessions were coerced, or whether five boys innocent of the crime simply chose to declare themselves guilty.

That they were innocent was officially acknowledged 13 years later, when a judge vacated their convictions. By then, though, the five had served their complete sentences, between 6 and 13 years. And their exoneration might never have come if not for a sequence of events that began when
Matias Reyes,
a serial rapist previously known to the police, confessed to the Central Park crime, and a DNA match confirmed his guilt. Subsequent investigations revealed that DNA tests of the five defendants had come back negative, and that their confessions were riddled with what Manhattan District Attorney
Robert Morgenthau
called "troubling discrepancies." But the impact of confessions, the documentary tells us, can be irreversible, trumping the results of DNA, and for whatever reasons, under whatever circumstances, the suspects had confessed.

(One year after their exoneration, each of the men filed a $50 million civil lawsuit against the city of New York, as well as police officers and prosecutors who had been involved in their conviction. Those lawsuits, mentioned only briefly in the film, remain unresolved, but the city, by way of defending itself, recently subpoenaed research and outtakes from the film.)

Watching "The Central Park Five" is a deeply affecting experience. When we see the film's subjects as suspects, pouring out their videotaped confessions (which they quickly disavowed after being released from police custody), they're not only frightened kids but, if we're to be honest with ourselves, frightening kids, the sort of urban apparitions—just listen to what they say they did—that would send anyone with an instinct for survival to the other side of a dark street. When we see them as adults, we have a strong sense of how they've suffered; who they might have been, if not for a random stroke of fate—"I was at that point of coming into who I was," one of them says , "but I never really got there"—and who they've become.

These were not, as we learn, apprentice angels. On the night of the Central Park rape, they were part of a group of kids roaming another part of the park where cyclists were being hassled, rocks were being tossed at cars and a homeless man was beaten. But neither were they rapists, and they have become, over time and against unimaginable odds, thoughtful, strikingly eloquent and, to a man, intensely likable. (The most eloquent of the five managed to get a college degree before, as one of them notes, "they took education out of prison.")

Watching "The Central Park Five" is also a deeply troubling experience, for the terrified young defendants were demonized to the point of being described as members of a teenage wolf pack that was wilding in the park. "Wilding" was a neologism, a term that gained instant currency in a city that convicted the five kids long before they went to trial. It's a different city today, in a country that sees its racial and social divides with more clarity than it did back then. But the most troubling question the film raises is how clearly we may see even now.

Watch a clip from the film "Killing Them Softly." Jackie (Brad Pitt) is a professional enforcer who investigates a heist that went down during a mob-protected poker game. Also starring James Gandolfini & Ray Liotta. (Photo & Video: Weinstein Co.)

'Killing Them Softly'

Andrew Dominik's
"Killing Them Softly" is one of those gloomy mood pieces that makes you wonder if the sun will ever come out. In fact, sunshine can be detected every now and then, but the surprising thing about the prevailing grayness is how it gives way, ever so slowly, to much darker, genuinely doomy and quite beautiful tableaux that evoke
Edward Hopper,
William Eggleston,
the aestheticized violence of "The Wild Bunch" or the elasticized bullet time of "The Matrix." I'd say the credits got it wrong and the movie's star is its cinematographer,
Greig Fraser,
even though
Brad Pitt
is very good in a pivotal role and was mainly responsible for getting the movie made. Another surprising thing is just how elastic time can be. Mr. Dominik's previous film, "The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford," was deliberately paced yet infallibly interesting over the course of 160 minutes. His new one, arriving five years later, clocks in at 97 minutes, and crawls.

ENLARGE

Brad Pitt
The Weinstein Company

Mr. Pitt is an enforcer, Jackie Cogan, who's brought in by the mob to put things right after a couple of dim-bulb thugs throw the local crime economy out of whack by holding up a mob-protected card game. Jackie is forced to work on the cheap because the national economy is also out of whack, so he's stuck with a subprime hire, a hit man, Mickey (
James Gandolfini
), who's boozing heavily, wallowing in despair and clearly not the efficient monster he once was.

Until Mickey makes his entrance, "Killing Them Softly," which the director adapted from a
George V. Higgins
novel, is a series of character studies about insufficiently intriguing characters. The two thugs, played by Scoot McNairy and
Ben Mendelsohn,
are supposed to be comically incompetent, but there's more incompetence than comedy, and lots of fancified dialogue, with echoes of
David Mamet,
that particularly afflicts several encounters in which Jackie discusses the sad state of illicit affairs with a midlevel mob manager played by
Richard Jenkins.
Mickey's character, on the other hand, warrants studying. Mr. Gandolfini finds so much to play in this scooped-out shell of a brutal nihilist, failed romantic and successful misogynist that you can almost forget how often he's played similar roles before. (
Ray Liotta,
as the card game's dealer, has also played similar roles before—too many times.)

As a gangster thriller, "Killing Them Softly" is long on violence and short on thrills, but it does present a mystery—why Mr. Dominik, a gifted New Zealander with a passion for American culture, was able to hold our attention so steadfastly in his previous film, which went on at such great length, and so fitfully in this one. Both films were concerned with character, though Mr. Pitt had much more to do as Jesse James, and he did it with a marvelous subtlety that was matched by
Casey Affleck's
spectacular performance as the assassin Bob Ford.

Yet "Jesse James" was intrinsically dramatic, while "Killing Them Softly" has been organized around an abstract concept—that the mob's loss of control over its own economic realm mirrors a loss of fiscal and economic control by Washington and Wall Street. (The action is frequently intercut with audio or video clips of President Bush and then President Obama addressing the financial crisis.) Whatever you may think of that concept, it's only a notion, not a dramatic premise, which is why the film, for all its visual felicities, comes to life only sporadically. To find out how such a notion can be dramatized, consult "The Godfather."

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